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I'm John McDonald, the CEO of CloudOne and an IBM Champion for Rational software. I'm participating in the IBM Cloud Innovation Forum in Chicago this week. Chief officials from many major corporations are here to listen and to talk about the impact of cloud.

When I ask about software and systems development, over and over again in hallway and mealtime conversations I hear a common theme: The hope that the cloud will help them manage the rapid globalization of software and systems development.

You know that many of the tools we use today for development were created before the web - and most certainly before the cloud. It was a huge challenge here at CloudOne to develop the infrastructure and processes to not only get many Rational tools to run in a cloud context, but to make them manageable and measurable. Yet the Internet and low-cost but highly skilled resources in different places around the world have thrust these tools into a global role, supporting collaboration around the clock in different languages across multiple organizations - and in many cases, they're not ready.

It's not so much the tools themselves, but the way we've gone about deploying them. It's just not acceptable anymore to have a server stuffed under someone's desk serving up code and projects. It's got to be now in a place that's managed 24-7, for users around the world.

The cloud helps with this, but it's not enough - we need to mature our operations and management processes to bring the level of our infrastructure on-par with other global business functions.

What changes are you making to your business and operations processes to take full advantage of software development in the cloud?

John McDonald has been an IBM Champion for the past two years. In addition to being the CEO of CloudOne, he is a founding and steering council member for the Cloud Standards Customer Council, which is defining service level agreements and standards for software development in the cloud. You can follow him regularly on the CloudOne blog or through Twitter @jpmcdon